1. Struggling through everyday
terminology challenges:
effective terminology maintenance and cost reduction.

2. Terminology Management
as Fitness
for translation projects
9th of May
Yulia Akhulkova, ITI Ltd.

3. CHALLENGES: 1. CAT EXPENSES.
Localization Process Complication
and Rise in Price
Almost every CAT now has its Term Management System.
Investment in CAT:
• purchasing,
• examination,
• resources training (and forcing to use a new CAT),
• implementation into the workflow,
• your translation price indirectly includes the client’s expenditures on the
particular CAT.

4. Benefits & cost reduction
 Independence from CAT-tools
 No need to train resources for each new TM tool
 No need to convert glossaries between CATs
 Easy involvement of smart customers in localization processes
 More contacts and relationships with customer
 Prompt understanding and approving => less terminology corrections => save time &
money
 Product community involvement if required
 It’s hardly possible to integrate product users into the CAT tools, but it’s easy in unified
terminology storage
SOLUTIONS: 1.
Unified Terminology
Storage & Management

5. CHALLENGES: 2. Term mining
Good glossary looks like But usual glossary is more like…

6. USUAL ILLUSIONS ON TERMINOLOGY
No glossary => No pain
?No glossary => More pain:
Without a terminology management system
 Terminology is hardly controlled
 Translation is inconsistent
 Errors are easily propagated and hardly found
In localization projects each term should be:
 Additional support point
 Low cost checkpoint

7. CHALLENGES: 2. Term mining
Usual ways:
 Term extraction utilities, based on statistical methods
 Manual gathering from bilingual content
Usual problem:
Reducing costs on terminology gathering.

8. Features
 Integration with:
 web dictionaries
 encyclopedias
 terminology portals
 Minimization of user manual activity
Benefits
 Fast finding of the term value:
 Convenient Reply-on-Click operability
 No need to learn ways of glossaries connection
SOLUTIONS: 2. Special Utilities
Time savings
Economy

9. USUAL ILLUSIONS ON TERMINOLOGY
Terminology is already in TM, no need to create a separate glossary
?Without a derived glossary
you face a severe problem of choice at the very first occurrence of any term:
Which translation of the term to pick from the TM? More recent?
And if there’s no history for the term and no adding time specified?
And what about the context? Is it the same in the TM or different?
And what about the meaning of the term? Its concept? “Ask Google”?
…
To make your localization life easier, store the glossary separately.

10. The Glossary you gathered and saved in the Unified Storage
is your Intellectual Asset
that may be successfully reused again and again.
because it is stored independently from CAT-tools.
SOLUTIONS: 2. Terminology mining.
Results

11. CHALLENGES: 3. Overweight glossaries
If the client sends you 10 000 “terminologically relevant” strings, how can
you treat them properly?
 Will you ask you translator and editor to remember all those strings
while processing the translatable text?
 Are you sure they will keep such amounts of terms in mind?
 Do you think they are able to successfully apply them?
 How much of your budget are you going to spend on this pseudo-
control?

12. SOLUTIONS: 3. Proper attitude
Includes:
 Term concepts (UI, product-specific, DNT, etc.) and definitions
 Confidence levels for terms: which translation you should trust?
 History: tracking of term changes in the unified storage. You need to know,
who changed the term and when to understand, which one to apply and why
to avoid corporate risks
 Smooth synchronization of glossary changes: spreading the info among
localization team (for example, you need to urgently notify the translators of
client’s latest term changes. Will you send Excel sheets? What will you do, if
they store the glossaries offline in CAT project files on their PCs?)
 Comments: for example, if you don’t protocol reviewer’s approved term
changes, you would be hardly able to prove to client that your version had
been initially correct and changed to incorrect by other team afterwards
 Discussion: reading the team’s discussion on terms helps you (and customer!)
solve the problem of choice

13. CHALLENGES: 4. Which attitude to choose?
The most frequently used terminology (management) tools as per
Joanna Gough from the University of Surrey, 2012
• SDL Multiterm (14,7%)
• ApSIC Xbench (4,5%)
• TermStar (3,8%)
Other popular solutions
• Kilgray qTerm
• ITI multiQA.com
• Interverbum Termweb
• MultiCorpora MultiTrans Prism
• CSOFT Termwiki
• INTERPLEX
• etc.
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
16
SDL
Multiterm
ApSIC Xbench TermStar
Tool

14. SOLUTIONS: 4.
Formulate and Prioritize your needs
Learning the glossary by
editors and
terminologists
Everyday notifications
on changes
Terminological plug-ins
(Financial) incentives
for users properly
enhancing the glossary
May exclude
Generalities
Different language pairs
and projects
Rollback to particular
date
User Management
(notifications, subscrip
tions, etc.)
Amount of terms
added by particular
user
Include on demand
Source and Target
Context
Concept
Term Confidence
Level
History of changes
Glossaries’ hierarchy:
branches, clones
Include
Term Mining
(crowd source)
Integration with QA

15. SOLUTIONS: 4. Examples
History
of changes
Example. Was the term the client’s reviewer claims you
wrongly used already in the provided glossary?
At the moment of review the term was there.
But at the moment of translation it wasn’t. How will you prove
your position to save your reputation? Search through e-mails?
And if you occasionally don’t have those in your inbox?
In such case you obviously need
logs from your TMS with info on
who, when and why has
imported the “harmful” term.
Rollback to
particular date

16. SOLUTIONS: 4. Examples
Example. No terminology on significant project. No time and/
or budget for terminologists or additional term mining stage.
Will you ‘blindly’ proceed with localization-without-
terminology finding yourself at the minefield?
Translators and editors of any team always investigate
terminology while doing their job. If they have an option of
on-click adding of the term into glossary, why not give them
a chance?(Financial)
incentives for users
properly enhancing
the glossary
In such case you may consider token payment for valid term
addition to user who inserted it.
Amount of terms
added by user
Key Performance
Indicators

17. SOLUTIONS: 4. Examples
Example. You have got the brilliant glossary on the project
and your client has kindly approved the terminology.
How can you check that the terms are translated properly
throughout the translation?
In such case you need your unified terminology system to
easily interact with QA-tool to build a terminology check
report on the selected glossary.
Integration
with QA-tool

18. SOLUTIONS: 4. Examples
Example. Multilingual project. Lack of terms
in one of the languages in TMS (new team
involved). Give the team a chance to see the
examples of other languages.
In such case you would need multilingual
glossary with concepts for users to consider
the meanings of the terms.
Example. Good release of English version of
the product. Reduce time spent on
achieving same results in other languages.
Thus you need unified multilingual “multi-
user” tool.
Different language
pairs and projects
Concept

19. SOLUTIONS: 4. Examples
Example. In particular automotive project, let’s say
Bentley, appears the general important term which needs to
be used in other automotive projects. Will you copy and
paste it to another glossary? And waste time on
propagation?
In such case you need to have the clear hierarchy of
glossaries and cloning option of a term or the whole
glossary into another.
Glossaries’
hierarchy:
branches,
clones
Example. Managing a set of glossaries at one
project. If your client has sophisticated
requirements to control, for
instance, terminology of 4 glossaries stages (or
even different glossaries), will you have and
track 4 different copies and thus complicate the
QA process?
In such case it’s better own 1 growing copy
with an option to perform QA on selected
branch (1 or more of 4).

20. USUAL ILLUSIONS ON TERMINOLOGY
My Terminology Management Tool already supports all languages.
Enough for proper terminology control.
?
Choose the tool with minimum level of false positives in
terminology QA procedures.
In languages with flexions Linguistic Support in TMS must not mean
only storage,
but associated Quality Assurance procedures.

21. Summary
The most effective way to make your terminology fit is
the right choice of the Tool or TMS, which covers all of
your terminological requirements.
Terms live their own life, from birth (meaning offered
term status) to death (meaning obsolete), and you
need to know how to treat them properly to make
them fit and working.
But regardless the tool the thing
you can’t exclude from
terminology management is the
work of the person, who makes
terminological decisions.

22. P.S.
Taking into consideration the growing variety of
Terminology Management tools and systems, the best
solution could be using required term management
options and facilities through API.
Then all the tools could successfully interact, combining
their functions to better the localization world. 
But that’s a kind of utopia, isn’t it?..